Guides to choosing and paying for web hosting
Long-form explanations of how hosting is actually priced and sold — written to answer the questions the comparison raises but cannot fit into a table.
The finder tells you which provider fits. These guides explain the things that decide whether you end up happy with it a year later — almost all of which are in the terms rather than on the pricing page.
Hosting is a category where the marketing and the reality diverge more than most. "Unlimited" is bounded, "99.9% uptime" is a refund policy rather than a promise, and the advertised price is a three-year commitment that triples on renewal. None of that is hidden exactly — it is all documented somewhere — but it is documented where nobody looks.
These guides are written to be useful to someone about to spend money, and they explain mechanisms rather than rank products. Where a specific price appears it is illustrative; the live figures are in the comparison table, and the methodology page is candid about how reliable those are.
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The renewal price trap: why web hosting costs 3-5x more in year two
Introductory hosting rates are loss leaders that expire. How the discount model actually works, what renewal really costs, and how to calculate the figure that matters before you commit to a three-year prepay.
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Shared, VPS, managed WordPress or static: which hosting type do you need?
The four hosting categories explained by what actually differs between them — who administers the server, what happens under load, and what you are really paying for — plus how to tell which one fits your site.
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What “unlimited” and “unmetered” actually mean in hosting plans
Unmetered bandwidth, unlimited storage and unlimited sites are all bounded by limits that appear elsewhere in the terms. Where to find the real constraints — inodes, CPU seconds, I/O throttling and fair-use clauses.
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How to read a hosting price page without getting caught out
Term-length pricing, prepayment requirements, first-year domain offers, migration fees, backup charges and the renewal rate — a checklist for working out the real cost before you reach checkout.
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Uptime SLAs: what 99.9% actually guarantees, and what you get if it fails
What each additional nine means in real downtime, why an SLA is a refund policy rather than a reliability promise, and what to check in the terms before treating uptime as a differentiator.
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Is free static hosting really free? Where the limits actually bite
Netlify, Vercel, Cloudflare Pages and GitHub Pages compared on what the free tier genuinely covers — build minutes, bandwidth, function invocations — and what happens when you exceed it.
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Managed WordPress hosting: when the premium is worth paying
Managed WordPress costs several times shared hosting. What you actually get for it — caching, staging, updates, security, support that knows WordPress — and the specific circumstances where it pays for itself.
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How to move hosts without downtime or losing email
A practical migration sequence — DNS TTL, staging on the new host, database sync, SSL, and the email cutover that catches most people out — plus when to pay the host to do it.
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What web hosting is not for: backups, file storage and bulk email
Unmetered storage tempts people into using hosting as a backup drive, a file archive or a mailing-list sender. Why each of those breaches the terms, and what to use instead.
Where to start
If you are about to buy, read the renewal price trap first and then how to read a hosting price page. Between them they cover almost everything that determines what hosting actually costs you.
If you are not sure which kind of hosting you need, start with choosing a hosting type, then read the guide for whichever category it points you at — managed WordPress or static hosting.
If you already have hosting and something is going wrong, see what “unlimited” really means for resource limits, uptime SLAs for reliability, and migrating hosts when it is time to leave.